Mass Re-Education for China’s Reporters

‘Chinese Dream’ promotion billboards are seen beside the CCTV office tower in Beijing on July 26, 2013.

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The Chinese government’s efforts to pressure foreign media by withholding credentials for more than 20 journalists have grabbed global headlines in recent weeks. But more stringent requirements for local journalists recently highlighted by state media show Beijing is engaged in a far more wide-ranging effort to control the country’s own reporters.

In a feature story published Tuesday, the English-language version of the state-run Global Times reports that 250,000 Chinese journalists are being made to attend weekly training sessions ahead of a certification exam scheduled for next year. All journalists are technically required to be certified in order to be able to legally conduct interviews or otherwise gather information. Such certification must be renewed every five years, the newspaper said, though such intensive and mandatory training sessions are new.

The aim of such training is to reinforce the “Marxist view of journalism,” the report said.

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According to the Global Times, textbooks used to train reporters define the Marxist view of journalism as one that emphasizes both “objectivity” and “the leading role of the [Communist] Party in publicity.” The media, it adds, is a “field and weapon to address the Party’s thinking and political ideas.”

The paper’s report suggests the training program is an effort to instill ethics in a profession that has lost its way, highlighting the recent detentions of several journalists charged with taking bribes.

“Some reporters who lack ethics still have not surfaced,” the newspaper quotes Yin Yugong, director of a research center that focuses on socialism with Chinese characteristics, as saying. “We urgently need to educate media circles with the Marxist view of journalism.”

But the training sessions were launched in June, before the bribery cases occurred. And the content of the training courses suggests the campaign is more about reining in local journalists than cracking down on corruption.

Chinese reporters and newspapers have occasionally tested the new leadership’s willingness to tolerate dissenting views. The biggest of those tests came in January when newsroom battles broke out at newspapers in Guangzhou and Beijing over the forced publication of editorials echoing party views. In the case of one of those newspapers, Southern Weekly, internal conflict spilled out into street protests that gained wide support online.

The party has since made it clear that it intends to tighten its grip on domestic media. In a major reform blueprint (in Chinese) released in November, it said that the qualification system for reporters should be tightened in order to “normalize the process of [information] dissemination.”

Authorities have delayed renewing press cards and visas for China-based journalists at Bloomberg and the New York Times this year after both news organizations published stories on the wealth of top Chinese leaders. Censors have blocked the websites of both organizations, as well as the Chinese websites of the Wall Street Journal and Reuters, earning a mention from U.S. Vice President Joe Biden during a visit to China earlier this month.

Analysts describe the moves as part of Chinese president Xi Jinping’s effort to clamp down politically as Beijing rolls out a series of potentially wrenching economic reforms.

As the Global Times notes, reporters in China already face a litany of hurdles, including physical threats. Apart from the new Marxist trainings, the newspaper also adds — without explanation — that journalists also struggle with “poor dating prospects.” A sign, perhaps, that state media is trying to scare people away from the profession altogether?

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